The History of Graphic Design

Bought this for a graduation gift for a new graphic designer. She loved it. Bright photos and a lot of inspiration.

The media could not be loaded. The book has curious facts and information very useful and also can be use for inspirational a purposes.

I got this for my daughter for Christmas, as she is an aspiring graphic designer. She really enjoyed it! Wonderful, colorful images and multiple languages. It's not a large book. The size surprised me. But I wasn't paying too close attention to the listing. All in all, she's very satisfied with it and that makes me happy.

Great book. Very informative and laid out well.

The timeline in this book alone is just soooo worth it! Very informative and have citation on all artwork , sooo you can look up the artists!!

When I got past the intro, I thought the book was a misprint because it suddenly jumps into (what I think is) the German translation. The pictures do not repeat, so you have a unique situation where the second language translations are integrated in ways that are unique to each chapter's design. I am sure it is quite an artistic feat to pull that off, and I am sure there is a lot of cost savings to the publisher, but the average reader will get no benefit from the text being presented in a second language. Regardless, I am only taking off one star for that, because it doesn't relate to the quality of the content but more so the quality of the presentation of the content. I have heard others complain about the images being small, but look at the dimensions of this book and know that this is more like a textbook and less like a coffee-table book. I mean, it works both ways, but they organized the content in a way that makes this a practical reference. While the book may be a bit unnecessarily thick, due to it being in two languages, its modest page dimensions make it very practical in my small desk library of physical references for writing and design. In other words, if you are wanting to look up an art trend like Art Deco, of course you could search the web, but that approach requires you to play the part of the curator trying to quickly get the skill of identifying a copycat. With a book like this, you get a very clean curation of examples. They are small in size, but that's because this is a reference type of book. It is giving you condensed examples to improve your familiarity. This is not like your typical book of art to look at, but more like a very illustrative textbook. A great companion to this book is Aaron Draplin's "Pretty Much Everything" which is a larger scale book more oriented towards providing inspiration. In fact, you could probably read this book and then be able to identify which era Aaron is replicating with each style he demonstrates in his book (nearly every known style is in there somewhere).

The book made a great gift.

If you’re looking for a book with straight graphics this one is it. It has minimal text and more so images for inspiration.